How a French retailer boosted its customer satisfaction rate to 95%

French home furnishings retailer L’Usine a Design found it had a problem last year—it lacked an online tool that would enable customers to choose and visualize all the possible color, material and style options of the sofas, loveseats, chairs and other items on its site. But manufacturing and photographing all 12 million possible combinations was an impractical, virtually impossible, solution.

That’s why it turned to Adobe Scene7. The offering, which uses digital images and swatches of the customizable options, allows the retailer’s customers to choose from L’Usine a Design’s various upholstery, colors and configuration options.

Scene7 also allows the site to offer consumers enlarged and multiple views of its products, including side, rear and front images, as well as contextual pictures. The customer is able to see her creation immediately, eliminating any uncertainty as to how the chosen options would look together, says Nicolas Thouzeau, technical director.

Since implementing Scene7 in August 2009, the site’s online sales growth has been in the double digits, the retailer says. Moreover, it says its customer satisfaction rate is 95%, due, in part, to broad use of its customizable options, says Thouzeau. “We would be hard pressed to run our business without Scene7,” he says.

Enabling customers to see all angles of images has proven to drive sales and reduce returns at several retailers beyond L’Usine a Design.

Golf supplies retailer Golfsmith.com found earlier this year that products with a 360-degree spin feature have conversion rates at least 10% higher and sometimes as much as 30% to 40% higher than products without it, the retailer says. The retailer uses equipment and services from Snap36 to take the photos and add the spinning sequences to its site.

Another retailer, SprinklerWarehouse.com, says it boosted sales 34% year over year after adding spinning sequences with the help of a system from Ortery Technologies Inc. that helps it take photos and add the rotating images to SprinklerWarehouse.com. The dollar value of returns also dropped from 3.4% to 1.2% of all sales, the retailer says.